Over [five million] [Homo Sapiens] attempted the Hardcore Tutorial. Of those, [One hundred seventy-three thousand, eight hundred twenty-two] successfully defeated their Dungeon Bosses. The remainder of [Earth’s] surviving population, [4.2 billion], chose the Casual Tutorial. [3.29 billion] of those were successful. The remainder were unable to clear their Tutorials within the allotted time.
My stomach rolled, threatening to throw up the baked beans and canned corn we’d eaten last night—and my Italian sandwich. There’d been at least eight billion people on Earth before this…whatever it was…happened. The System was telling us that half had died during the terraforming—without even having a chance to complete the tutorial. And another nine hundred million had died since. My head wouldn’t stop spinning.
Even the Casual Tutorial hadn’t been a guaranteed victory like I’d thought—not if almost a billion people hadn’t made it through.
Tori was already on the ground, but she’d started shaking and rocking back and forth, so I sucked in a quick breath before bile could surge up my throat and put a hand on her shoulder. “She’s gonna be okay,” I said. “They’re all gonna be okay.”
The girl wouldn’t look at me, but she stopped rocking quite so much.
Now that you know the stakes and your Tutorial has taught you the basics, it’s time to start working toward uplift and integration. There will be no Casual or Hardcore options. Your first objective is to advance and uplift.
Similarly to your Tutorial Dungeon experience, [Earth’s] surface is now populated by monsters and World Bosses. These are designed to be challenging to Tutorial Dungeon survivors, with rewards to match. Tier One, Two, and Three Dungeons will also become available over the next [two weeks]. These will offer more significant challenges—as well as greater rewards.
The Tier Three Dungeons also bar the path to Phase Two; you must clear all Tier Three Dungeons in your region to advance.
The Consortium wishes all remaining [Homo sapiens] luck with Phase One.
Okay. Alright. We’d cleared the Hardcore Tutorial. How bad could finding and getting through a Tier Three Dungeon possibly be? I was already building a map of Chicago in my head; which landmarks might be dungeons, and which ones could I realistically get to? Sears Tower—that’d be one. And probably Lincoln Park Zoo and Union Pier. Those were both on our way to…
The Chicago Field Museum.
It sat at one edge of a cluster of attractions. The Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, and Soldier Field were all bunched together; they’d all be dungeons for sure. And so would the Field Museum. All four would probably be Tier Two—I didn’t know how I knew that. It just felt right. They’d be a hotspot for anyone who wanted to level up and get stronger.
And Tori’s mom was probably heading there, with a Casual Tutorial class—along with probably a quarter of the city.
That wasn’t good. But I couldn’t let Tori know that, either. She needed her stepmom to be there. She needed her to be safe.
Dungeon Seeds Germinating
Tier One Dungeons Activated
Welcome to Phase One, [Hal Riley]!
Team: Hal Riley, Tori Vanderbilt, Calvin Rollins
Objective: Advance and Uplift
Objective: Clear Tier Three Dungeon (1,322 Remaining)
Time Limit: Three Weeks
Time until Tier Two Dungeons Activate: Forty-Eight Hours
Time until Tier Three Dungeons Activate: Two Weeks
“You’re sure she’s going to be alright?” Tori asked. She was still in the sand, and as I looked her way, she wiped her mouth on her armor’s sleeve. She looked pale, and her wide eyes kept flicking from my face to Calvin’s.
I reached out a hand and pulled her to her feet. “Yeah, she’ll be okay. I bet she’s not the only person heading for the museum, though. If we move fast, we might beat her there. It depends on where her Tutorial Dungeon was—and where she came out when she finished.”
The shimmering hexagonal barrier disappeared. A moment later, the three-week timer started ticking down.
“Yeah, I guess. Maybe her spawn point was in a good spot,” Tori said.
“Right,” Calvin said. “The Field Museum sounds like a winning plan, and I haven’t seen a dinosaur in decades—not since I was a kid.”
Tori looked at him with narrowed eyes.
“Of course, I saw them when they were alive! Been around a while.”
The girl’s eyes narrowed even more, and for a second, I thought she might freak out at Calvin. Then she snorted, looking away from him—but I caught the grin before she could turn all the way away. “Come on,” she said, obviously trying to be tough, angry, or just plain anything but a scared mid-high school girl. She started walking south.
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Calvin shot me a quick glance, and I fell behind to talk with him. “You’re sure her mom’s alive?”
“No. I’m not sure about anything, and I’m definitely not sure we should be heading for the museums. But if thinking her stepmom’s there keeps her going for a while, that’ll be enough.”
“And what if she ain’t?”
I shrugged. That was a problem that future Hal would have to solve, because I could barely handle everything that had happened to us so far. “Maybe we’ll find some other people, and she can go with them. I don’t have a plan yet.”
He shook his head. “That ain’t gonna work for her. You might want to start thinking about making one, just in case her mom didn’t make it. And you’d better have a plan for if she’s not the only person there. Not everyone’s as friendly as me.” Then he kept walking, shuffling along in his ragged clothes and the backpack I’d traded him.
After a few seconds, I did, too.
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We hadn’t made it across the beach when the first monsters attacked us.
They looked like crabs, but in place of claws, two huge knives had been grafted to their front limbs like scissors. As they clacked their claws and scuttled sideways across the sand, the blades swung past each other with a metal-on-metal screech.
It wouldn’t have been so bad, except that each crab was the size of a small dog, and there were a ton of them.
Knife Crab: Level 14 Monster
The first crab rushed me, coming in sideways with knives slicing at about mid-calf height. I pulled the Trip-Hammer out, fired it up, and turned it into fresh, fading, pink-white tempura with a massive thud that sent shockwaves up my infected arm. But before I could recharge for another swing, another crab sliced a blade through my armor. It didn’t bite deep into my leg—the handmade leather mostly held, and my Body was getting up there—but it was enough to send me skipping back away from the oncoming Knife Crabs.
Another pair of scissors lashed out at my leg. I backpedaled even more, but before I could escape, the crab rocketed backward. It slammed knife-first into another crab, punching through its shell and tumbling both head over way too many heels. I looked over my shoulder; Tori was breathing hard, one hand up in a comic-book pose. I nodded and readied the Trip-Hammer again. “Thanks,”
“No…no problem. That took a lot more energy than it should have, though.”
I filed that away; we’d need to work on her endurance, but I had an idea of her real issue. “Later. Toss the crabs!”
She picked up another crab and tossed it like a writhing, bladed bowling ball as I pulverized my second. Then, as I reset the Trip-Hammer, I backpedaled away.
They weren’t that fast; honestly, the Rat Men had been harder to deal with, despite the huge level difference. The rest of the fight devolved into the same basic pattern. Toss, Trip-Hammer, retreat, repeat. Sometimes, Tori picked up two or three crabs, but by the end, she was down to one again.
It took less than two minutes to reduce the Knife Crabs into so many balls of glowing, green-yellow experience.“You want some of these?” I asked Calvin as Tori started picking up her experience.
“No, I’ve got everything I need,” he said. “You two go ahead.”
As we picked up our orbs, I watched Tori. She was moving slowly, not so much limping as sort of half-stumbling. It felt like she’d spent herself a lot more than she should have in a fight that short, and it wouldn’t be sustainable. When she stopped picking up orbs, I cleared my throat.
“So, what happened, Tori?”
“That’s such a Mom thing to ask,” she said, narrowing her eyes slightly. She was right, except that I’d gotten that line from my dad. She couldn’t stand up to the waiting, or to my raised eyebrow, either. “I don’t know. I got a lot of new spells, and I was trying one out. Push and Pull. I guess it uses a lot of energy, though.”
“You guess?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Have you spent the points you just got?” I walked toward the last orb, which zoomed toward my chest.
Level Up! Eighteen to Nineteen.
“No, but I could have picked up seven or eight of them with the same amount of effort.” The girl crossed her arms, staring at the beach that had, just a minute ago, been covered in crab guts.
“You don’t have to. Do you know how much magic you use on a given spell?”
“No. Do you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Awareness lets me see how much energy I’m spending on magic. At least, it did before I lost all my Mana for this class. I bet it’ll work for a Telekineticist, though. Put your points in Awareness.”
She glared at me some more, but she did. “I don’t see it.”
“You will. Your Awareness is at, what? Seven? Get it to ten.”
Tori nodded slowly as I put my two points into Awareness. The crabs hadn’t left any loot behind, and there wasn’t much to do, so we stood around awkwardly for a moment before I coughed. My arm was sore under the armor, and firing the Trip-Hammer had been painful. If I wanted to make it through this, we needed to find some medication. Either that or…
“Do you think healers are pretty common?” I asked Tori and Calvin. “I could use one.”
“Yeah, that cut looks pretty bad,” Tori said, staring at my leg. “Uh, the orbs are out of Minecraft, and I’ve seen a bunch of other gaming stuff, so maybe.”
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We pushed into Chicago, heading southwest into the grid of old brick buildings south of Andersonville.
I couldn’t help but think about Mrs. Faren as we turned and walked away from my old house. Was she okay? Or was she still at home? Had she been put into a Casual Tutorial far away from Andersonville? Everyone on the train had just vanished except for us, but surely it wouldn’t just be Hardcore players in Chicago. The whole world wasn’t a Hardcore Tutorial Dungeon, after all.
My stuff was back in Andersonville, too. It’d just be a short detour, but I didn’t have much, and very little of it would be helpful here. My tools were all at Cindy’s Automotive, and other than a few changes of clothes, the attic apartment was pretty much just food, a burner, and my mattress.
I decided I was okay with never seeing any of it again. Besides, we had other priorities.
We had to hug Lake Michigan, or at least keep it in view. The further away we got from it, the darker the streets got, passing even the semi-dark of the Redline Tunnels. I got a bad feeling in my gut that only worsened as we closed in on Wrigley Field.
That had to be one of the Tier Two dungeons. It wouldn’t be open yet, but I didn’t want to be anywhere near it when it finally did.
A few Huntsman Bats found us, but we took care of them pretty easily with the Trip-Hammer and Tori’s spells. While the fighting was going, Calvin discovered that most buildings were completely sealed. Not locked, either, but sealed off magically. I tried using the Trip-Hammer to open a door, too, but it didn’t even leave a dent. “This has to be part of the terraforming,” I said.
“Yeah. No idea why they don’t want us in the buildings, but it looks like not heading for your houses was the right call,” Calvin said.
I kept moving, with the others following me. As I did, the trees lining the streets between the brownstone buildings and us grew thicker until their canopy blocked out the stars.
Then, suddenly, they weren’t just thicker. They were an impenetrable wall of twisted brambles and knotted trunks.
We turned left on Fullerton, toward Lincoln Park.